Heritage without community: rethinking conservation through relational infrastructure in post-Confucian Vietnam

Global heritage discourse increasingly promotes community-based conservation as an inclusive and sustainable paradigm. Yet in many post-Confucian contexts, this model encounters structural constraints that remain insufficiently theorised. This article addresses the gap through a mixed-methods case study of Dan Phuong, a peri-urban district of Hanoi, where residents exhibited strong cultural awareness but minimal participation in conservation. Surveys, ritual observations, and policy analysis revealed a persistent disconnect between affective attachment and institutional mechanisms of engagement. The absence of soft intermediary institutions – compounded by habitual dependency, circular accountability, and strategic disengagement – undermined the operational viability of community-based models. In response, the study develops the concept of relational infrastructure, reframing heritage governance as a distributed, multi-agent process attuned to the relational specificities of post-Confucian social dynamics. By integrating critical heritage studies, post-Confucian sociology, and posthumanist theory, this approach advances ongoing debates on heritage futures, everyday heritage, and distributed governance. It offers a culturally grounded, contextually adaptive alternative with transferable implications for peri-urban heritage zones facing social fragmentation and institutional thinness.